People's Weekly World, 15
February 1997. In the '30s, when few were willing to
fight for justice where Blacks were involved, the US
Communist party stepped forward and saved the lives of the
nine ‘Scottsboro Boys’ who were falsely
accused of raping a white woman in Alabama.

By Bill Fletcher Jr. and Peter Agard, The
Dispatcher, February 2000. The industrial union
movement, known at the time as the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), transformed the U.S. labor movement. In
the process of this transformation Black workers left their
mark.

By The African Peoples Commission, Freedom Road
Socialist Organization (FRSO). Harry Haywood's
greatest contribution was his central role in developing a
theoretical understanding of the Black nation in the
United States.

By Louis Proyect, 12 January 1999. The Messenger
magazine, and the group of Afro-American socialists who
conducted and supported it in Harlem, was the only
magazine of Scientific Radicalism in the world published
by Negroes.

By Albert Lannon. C. L. Dellums became a pacific coast
vice president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
in 1928, and went on to become a major figure in
Oakland's African American Community, heading the
NAACP and bringing its support to the 1946 Oakland General
Strike.

By Louis Proyect, 4 January 1999. C. L. R. James
disagreed with the Workers Party because he advocated an
independent Black nationalist struggle rather than
submersion within a broader white white-led
progressivism.

By Thomas C. Fleming, Sun Reporter. Harry
Bridges and John L. Lewis, the head of the International
Miner's Union, felt that the union movement must
embrace Black workers. The west coast longshoreman strike,
which mushroomed into a general strike in San Francisco
and Oakland, resulted in Blacks being welcomed into the
union in exchange.

Susan Lamont, the Militant. Review of a
book on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. From
1932–72 Black sharecroppers and day laborers were
victims in a federally-financed racist study that
withheld treatment of the deadly disease because people of
color have bad blood.

Peopleŝs Weekly World, 7
September 1999. Louise Patterson, who worked with Paul
Robeson, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, her husband William
L. Patterson and other great leaders during a lifetime of
struggle for African American equality and socialism died
in New York Aug. 27, age 97.

By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times. Louise
Thompson Patterson, a social activist who was the last
remaining survivor of the cultural movement known as the
Harlem Renaissance and a longtime associate of poet and
playwright Langston Hughes, died Aug. 27 1999, in New
York.

By Barbara Ransby, 16 December 2003. Ella Josephine
Baker was one of the most influential people in the
crusade for racial justice in America. For more than 50
years, she traveled the breadth of this country
organizing, protesting and advocating for social
justice. Her main concern was the plight of blacks, whose
rights, she argued, were the litmus test for American
democracy.

By Shaun Byron, The Romeo Observer, 1 February
2006. Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson is among the surviving members
of the Tuskegee Airmen, the country's first black combat
pilots. His experiences have recently been put into a book,
called “Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: The Memoirs of
a Tuskegee Airman and POW.”

By Alan Wald, Against the Current, May/June
2000. A review of four books. From the early 1920s until
the late 1950s, the U.S. Communist movement was a
significant pole of attraction in African-American political
and cultural life.

By Marika Sherwood, 1 April 1999. Born in Trinidad in
1915, Claudia Jone's family moved to Harlem, New
York, where the young Claudia soon became involved with
local Communist politics. In the immediate postwar years,
Jones was a leading political figure of the left, still
remembered for the rousing orations she gave to thousands
in Madison Square Garden, when she was imprisoned despite
ill-health during the McCarthy witchhunts.

By IWB, World Socialist Web Site, 16 December 1996.
Former NAACP leader Thurgood Marshall regularly provided
information to the FBI. The political role played and social
interests served by the NAACP, both past and present. Marshall
was opposed, at least initially, to the mass upsurge of workers
against segregation.

By Clarence Lang, 12 March 2001. In Race Against
Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,
1937–1957, historian Penny M. Von Eschen
contributes toward understanding the intersections among
pan-Africanism, Afro-American politics, and the U.S. Cold
War front during this period.

By Richard Pearson, Washington Post, 2
December 2000. Marvel Cooke, 99, a former New York
journalist who also was a noted labor and political and
civil rights activist. She began her adult life at the tail
end of the Harlem Renaissance. Along the way, she wrote
about and socialized and worked with many of the leading
political and artistic figures of her age.